The importance of a website for your business extends to every aspect of your digital marketing strategy. It’s the hub of your online presence, through which your customers flow from your digital campaigns to find information about your business and offerings. Your website is often your customers’ first impression of your brand—even if you are a brick and mortar business that relies on foot traffic, there’s a very good chance that your customers are researching you online before they come in.

As such, if your website is slow, unattractive, or confusing to navigate, you may be turning potential customers away without even knowing it. This also means that even if your other digital marketing campaigns are well-executed, without a well-designed website, those efforts may be wasted.

So how do you accomplish good website design? Be sure to consider the following factors.

1) Audience Research

As you’re planning out your new website or evaluating your current one for improvements, take a step back to consider and understand your audience and their online behavior. What are their goals and preferences? The content on your site should be informative and help them better understand your products and services.

2) Brand Identity

Your website is your chance to put your best foot forward as a business. Most potential customers will get an initial impression of your brand by visiting your website, so make sure that you’re happy with how it’s represented. Consider how you use colors, fonts, imagery, and content to create the experience a user will have while visiting your site. How your website makes a user feel will directly affect how they perceive your brand.

4) Responsiveness

Responsive web design is an essential part of any website. With the growth of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile computing devices, more people are using smaller screens to view web pages. If your website isn’t designed to adjust to these different formats, then you may be losing visitors due to poor user experience. Additionally, Google search engine algorithms factor in a website’s mobile presence as a ranking factor, so websites that aren’t responsive may experience a decline in their organic search traffic.

5) Conversion Optimized

Your website should make it easy for visitors to convert. You can boost conversions by limiting the number of choices users have to make on your site to reach their goal. For example, you may overwhelm your customers from the start if your website’s navigation bar has too many choices.

When it comes to eliminating the number of choices on your website, think about which actions are the most important for your bottom line.

6) Fast Page Load Times

In an age where the average length of the human attention span is 8 seconds, you have a very small window to engage a user with your website. You won’t want to waste any of that valuable time with a website that doesn’t load quickly.

Typically, three to four seconds or less is considered a good page load time, but once you exceed that load time, people will start to lose interest and drop off. Further, site speed is a ranking factor for Google search engines.

7) Search Engine Optimization

Beyond page load times and responsive design, there are a number of content, technical, and structural considerations in website development that impacts your site’s search engine rankings. If your website fails to comply with these standards, you may be missing out on valuable organic traffic.

Your website is a lot more than a simple placeholder on the internet. It’s the foundation of your digital marketing efforts. Every digital marketing channel that you use—whether it be social media, email, or advertising—will be less effective if you have a poorly designed website. Businesses that take the time to research and define a website design strategy will reap the benefits of their digital marketing efforts long term.

Every digital marketing channel that you use—whether it be social media, email, or advertising—will be less effective if you have a poorly designed website.